A techie from Bengaluru who recently went viral for turning his helmet into a traffic police device using artificial intelligence, has now captivated the interests of the city top police official.
A software engineer by profession, Pankaj Tanwar had taken to X on Sunday to share something he invented to deal with his annoyance with how people drive on Bengaluru roads.
In his post, Tanwar wrote that he was tired of “stupid people on road” so he “hacked” his helmet into a traffic‑police-style camera gun that flags real time road safety violations. The system identifies violations, captures the number plate, and sends photographic proof with time, date, location directly to traffic police email IDs. A demonstration showed a helmetless scooter rider being instantly flagged and reported. commented.
Top cop reaches out
While Tanwar’s hacked helmet was being praised as a “peak Bengaluru innovation” by netizens, it also caught the attention of the office of Commissioner of Police for Bengaluru.
Tanwar posted a half-cut screenshot of a DM he received from the Commissioner’s office. In the message, police commissionor appreciated the “innovative” helmet-based traffic violation detection concept engineered by Tanwar and asked for an appointment to understand its workings.
As per the image posted by Tanwar, the police’s DM read, “Hello, Mr Pankaj, Greetings from Bengaluru City Police. We have come across your recent posts regarding the helmet-based traffic violation detection concert and found the idea very innovative and interesting from a road safety perspective. We would appreciate the opportunity to understand…” The message cuts off after that in the screengrab.
Tanwar seemed to be exhilarated by the development. “OMG. office of the commissioner of police, blr reached out 🤯,” he captioned the post.
How does the tech work?
Tanwar’s device uses a dashcam integrated into the helmet and a locally running AI model that classifies rule-breaking behaviour. Once detected, the system autonomously generates an email with evidence attached with no manual intervention.
Social media users praise idea, debates privacy
In the comments section of the posts, multiple netizens highlighted numerous positive benefits of such tech being adopted by the state police. Tanwar’s post also received a reaction from actor Kunal Kapoor. “Brilliant! Want one, even though I rarely drive,” he commented.
Meanwhile, some expressed hesitation about the implications of civilians deploying automated monitoring tools. Suggestions also poured in for scaling the idea: connecting dashcams to the cloud, offering incentives such as a 10 percent share of challan amounts for citizens‑submitting evidence.
Beyond praise, several developers, founders, and investors reached out to Tanwar, offering help to scale the innovation into a hardware product and deploy it across large camera networks.
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